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Morrissey’s Seven Inch Plastic Strap-On

There’s a naked man stand­ing laugh­ing in your dreams.
You know who it is, but you don’t like what it means.

A num­ber of people have for­war­ded Morrissey’s pubes to me. (For which, many thanks.)

I thought I could get away with not dis­cuss­ing the Moz minge, but this Red Hot Chili Peppers pas­tiche, nos­tal­gic vinyl tak­ing the place of stuffed socks, which appears on the inside sleeve of Morrissey’s new single ‘Throwing My Arms Around Paris’ has gen­er­ated a lot of com­ment­ary, some amused, some not, and some, such as Paul Flynn in the Guardian, cit­ing it as ‘the latest sign of artistic decline’.

But all of it sug­gest­ing Morrissey’s cur­lies can­not be ignored.

It’s funny how Morrissey man­ages to repeatedly sur­prise people with his con­sist­ent, insist­ent coquet­tish­ness. Only last year, legions were scan­dal­ized when that pic­ture taken in the early 90s of His Mozness’ naked hairy arse with ‘YOURARSEAN’ ALL’ scrawled across it in Magic Marker (with the apo­strophe in ‘AN’ ALL’ aimed at Moz’s fun­da­ment) appeared in a book­let for his Greatest Hits col­lec­tion: ‘So gross! This must mean he’s, like, totally gay!’

But Morrissey, odd, reclus­ive creature that he is, has never exactly been a shrink­ing violet. His work has always had a naughty, ‘cheeky’, exhib­i­tion­ist side. As he sang back in the day on the Meat is Murder track ‘Nowhere Fast’: ‘I’d like to drop my trousers to the Queen — every sens­ible child will know what this means’. His first single fea­tured a close-up of naked male gay porn star’s bubble-butt. His first album had a shot of the torso of a naked male hust­ler on it. (Like all the art­work dur­ing his Smiths period, it was all selec­ted and dir­ec­ted and prob­ably even pas­ted up by him.)

After The Smiths split, he became his own cover star and was to be found hug­ging his top­less solo self on his 1997 ‘Best Of’ collection.

And while he may have once scorned her shame­less­ness, Moz’s out­rageous ‘November Spawned a Monster’ promo in 1990 out-Madonna-ed Madonna, fea­tur­ing him writh­ing in the desert in a skimpy see-through mesh blouse that some­how keeps slip­ping off — per­haps because he appears to be being bummed by an odd-shaped boulder.

On-stage he pole-dances around his songs often end­ing on his back with his legs in the air, obli­gingly lif­ted towards the aud­it­or­ium, while yodel­ling. Even today, it’s still an abso­lute and legal require­ment of all tick­ets sales that Moz strips off his sweat-soaked shirt at least once every show and throw it into the crowd, who instantly rend it to tiny fra­grant shreds, which they then appear to eat.

If Morrissey doesn’t get his tits out for the lads and lasses you’re entitled to a full refund, I believe. It’s always been a flag­rantly, prob­ably patho­lo­gic­ally sexual thing between Moz and his fans. Though as he’s got older and thicker around the mid­riff the pole-dancing, does get a bit more, er, awkward.

Oh, and the naked Moz show­ing us his shaved armpit shot by Eamonn McCabe (which seems to be an update of the fam­ous Narcissus statue by Cellini) used on the jacket of Saint Morrissey — partly to under­mine the title - ori­gin­ally appeared on the cover of the NME in 1988 and on a big, fold-out, blue-tac-to-your-sweaty-teen-boy-bedroom-wall poster inside.

Today’s naked Moz looks very dif­fer­ent. Which is only nat­ural since he’s now nearly 50 — though of course age­ing nat­ur­ally is the height of unnat­ur­al­ness these days. But the boy­ish exhib­i­tion­ism is largely unchanged. Yes, he has the body of a middle-aged male celebrity who scan­dal­ously refuses to hire a per­sonal fit­ness trainer (even if one or two of the chaps in his employ look as if they’d rather be on a ten mile run).

But he’s also show­ing us that inside the body of a pub land­lord from County Mayo is still a skinny lonely boy from Stretford, nakedly demand­ing our love. With a seven inch pop single where his man­hood should be. That’s how people don’t grow up.

If you look closely — and clearly I have — this jokey pic isn’t really very funny. Like ‘Throwing My Arms Around Paris’, it’s sadly, proudly defi­ant. It’s Morrissey’s fam­ily por­trait. This is what his love-life looks like. It’s all here: Pop music. His band-mates. His fans (we’re look­ing at him again — he’s that naked man laugh­ing and cry­ing in our dreams).

And, centre of shot, per­haps his most endur­ing rela­tion­ship of all: the one he has with his hair.

Simply an over­re­ac­tion to feminism’s objec­tion to women being objec­ti­fied. Males have become very nar­cisistic, e.g. note the sur­feit of straight exere­cise & body build­ing peri­od­ic­als fea­tur­ing male mus­cu­lature. The one place where female bod­ies are ok is in the sale of san­it­ary products and sim­ilar health aids.
It is true in this con­text that some Americans would be so abtuse as to con­sider that a pic­ture of Mos’s humble hairy arse was gay. But then they have an odd take on art all around.

If that is your assess­ment of pop­u­lar media, then you are not see­ing things object­ively. Take any male body part and com­pare its treat­ment with the cor­res­pond­ing female body part and the lat­ter will always be met with more con­tro­versy and moral out­rage. Let’s go down the list:

Chests: Male chests are not con­sidered nud­ity and are shown every­where. Bare female chests are only shown in restric­ted media. A woman wear­ing a tightly fit­ting top is more scan­dal­ous than a top­less man.

Genitals: Male gen­italia can be shown in rated-R movies, cable, video­games, and edu­ca­tional pro­grams. Female gen­italia is shown only, with very few excep­tions, in porn.

“madonna, kylie minogue to name two fre­quently flash their aging bod­ies to sell records..”

Show me pro­mo­tional ads that either of these women have done in the last ten years that show bare tits and bush.

“not to men­tion the stream of female nud­ity in many music videos at the moment.. x”

Music videos don’t show female nud­ity; they show females in skimpy cloth­ing with their private areas covered. Men don’t wear skimpy cloth­ing in videos, not because it’s taboo or con­sidered shock­ing, but because they know people will think they look moronic.

“were this lit­er­ally any female artist it would be con­sidered a require­ment not a note of contention.”

This makes no sense con­sid­er­ing that female nud­ity is gen­er­ally far more con­tro­ver­sial than male nud­ity. When’s the last time a pop­u­lar, espe­cially older, female artist showed her tits and bush in a pro­mo­tional ad?

If that’s all that Mr Flynn can des­cern as the “latest sign of artistic decline” in the west­ern world we are in sin­ni­fic­antly bet­ter shape than real dia­gnostic meas­ures would seem to indic­ate. He could stand a read of Paglia’s ‘Sexual Personae”, and then comment.

I don’t see so much patho­lo­gical exhib­i­tion­ism present as, just boy­ish defiance–so much a neces­sity to his per­sonae. The obses­sion with his hair is even more endear­ing in the Cellini-like shot-so strangely self con­cious– like he had a bird there.

As T.S. Eliot (?) said ‘art should not mean but be”: here’s the per­son­i­fic­a­tion of himself–MOZ could be offend­ing people as much as giv­ing them a laugh and cer­tainly rep­res­ent­ing hims.
the image of ‘hand in glove’ is too much. . . ‘erotic ter­ror­ism’ no doubt today in gay America (would they get it though?)

you’ll all see when you get older. bit tired here of the con­stant nag­ging of 20-something year olds demand­ing that 50-something year olds look like them. piss off. while i never cared in the fan­at­ical way many do for his music, mor­ris­sey look pretty damn hot to me — more like a man than he did in the 80s and i wouldn’t kick him out of bed for eat­ing crack­ers. so says this 30 year old.

Continental 7inch vinyl singles used to have these really large holes in the middle, unlike British singles.
Much more fun could be had with those (unless there is com­ment about British endow­ment in there somewhere).